aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Wednesday, March 12, 2008

Dawkins on God and Einstein

Last week Fresh Air repeated an interview with God Delusion author Richard Dawkins. I hadn’t heard it before and found him wonderfully eloquent, particularly in this explanation of why he believes that to credit all human achievement to God is an impoverishment of what the real world has to offer:

I think that the understanding of life, and indeed of science generally, the understanding of the universe generally that we now have at the beginning of the 21st century, is an astoundingly rich, poetically valuable, truly wonderful achievement of our species, something that we have every right to be proud of. You could spend a lifetime imbibing and learning and understanding and increasing understanding of this view that we now have. It is incomparably richer than anything that our ancestors in past centuries could have. It is an enormous privilege to have it. No one individual could possibly comprehend it. It’s a lifetime’s worth just to understand bits of it. And I think it is demeaning to retreat from that to a medieval worldview which simply says, `God done it,’ which is so trite, so cheap, so over simple, so parochial and so impotent in the face of the huge phenomena which need to be explained and which now are being explained.

I urge you to listen to the interview because I do not believe he is disrespectful of religious people (though they, of course, may think otherwise). Gross asks him to read from his book where he quotes Einstein on God. I’ll excerpt that here:

Mr. DAWKINS: Let me make a distinction between two versions of what you’ve just said. There’s what I would call the Einsteinian version, which pays homage to the mysteries that lie in the universe at the base of physics, the mysteries that physics has yet to solve and may never solve. Einstein had immense reverence for that, as do I. Einstein used the word “god” for the deep problems, for those fundamentals which we don’t understand and may never understand.

But I would want to make a distinction between that Einsteinian view and the one that says there is a spirit which has some sort of intelligence; there is a supernatural, intelligent, creative being who created the universe and made up its laws. I think that’s radically distinct from the Einsteinian view that the laws of physics are renamed God. And I have no quarrel with somebody who wants to use the word God for the fundamental laws of the universe. My only quarrel would be that it’s confusing to everybody else. But once we’ve set confusion on one side, then I have no quarrel with that.

What I do have a quarrel with is people who confuse that with God in the sense of some kind of supernatural intelligence or creator who worked it out, and I think there really is a big distinction there.

GROSS: Well, since you brought up Einstein, and since you quote Einstein several times in your book “The God Delusion,” let me ask you to read a few of the things that you quote by Einstein about religion.

Mr. DAWKINS: Right, well, from page 15 of “The God Delusion”:

(Reading) “It was, of course, a lie, what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal god and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious, then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.”

And further down the same page, I quoted Einstein as saying, “I am a deeply religious nonbeliever. This is a somewhat new kind of religion.’

GROSS: So do you consider yourself religious in the Einsteinian sense?

Mr. DAWKINS: Yes, I do consider myself religious in the Einsteinian sense, and obviously with great humility. Einstein was the greatest scientist of the 20th century and maybe ever, and so I humbly am happy to be classed as in his camp in this respect.